Learning German

[SGirl]

Saddle bum said:

I believe the ease or difficulty associated with languages may have something to do with your ancestry. Being very blond and blue-eyed, when abroad I had problems getting people to accept I was English.

I don't know about ancestry, but in my experience language learning tends to be dependent upon aptitude. Some people find languages easy to pick up, others struggle.

As a professional translator, I encounter a lot of linguists in my day-to-day job. Some of them are excellent linguists, some less so. But in "real life", most people I meet claim to have found languages hard, and so they gave up language learning as soon as they were allowed to do so. It doesn't seem to be related to desire to learn as such - some people just genuinely find languages hard.

[Asgardian]

maser_spyder said:

You need a German girlfriend.

Not the only way to learn for sure, but the most fun way.

This is what I did, but she is so good at English that she forgets she's speaking it, the people at her work all give her funny looks and then she realies she's switched to english haha

She says English makes more sense than German to her and sometimes is stuck for the german word for something yet knows the English for it...I find this bizarre

[paulwoof]

thanks for the reply guys, I understand its going to be quite difficult but i need a challenge, most things i do are mundane apart from playing guitar which ive stuck at for around 8 years now.

ive got started on duolingo.com which was reccomended earlier which i have found a good way to dabble in so thanks for posting that, i dont have a microphone to do the speaking excercises and the womans voice who does the examples isnt the clearest but im getting there.

i see my frustration with genders is starting again, feminine, masculine and nueter, i havent got as far as applying them to anything bar their respective human genders, der Mann, die Frau, das Kind,

i read that every noun in german is capitalized, is this the norm in all writing, from say novels to kids on facebook. does everyone start any noun with a capital? would seem strange to be typing to some on facebook and keep hitting the caps lock key for every noun.

ich bin der Mann

[SGirl]

paulwoof said:

i read that every noun in german is capitalized, is this the norm in all writing, from say novels to kids on facebook. does everyone start any noun with a capital? would seem strange to be typing to some on facebook and keep hitting the caps lock key for every noun.

ich bin der Mann

Nouns are capitalised in correct German. You might see non-capitalised nouns in error, or in very informal texts, but they're not correct.

Just wait until you start learning compound nouns.

[Use Psychology]

i told my german teacher that i didn't believe in capital letter, and they're essentially redundant. she was a bit perplexed.

[renmure]

I struggled so much with German at school. I was one of these geeky swots who left school with a bunch of A and O levels all at Grade A yet failed my O-level German twice... the second time I failed by a bigger margin then the first. My parents got me a tutor and I really did work at it and do my homework but ... Oddly, I passed O-Level Latin but don't use it much in conversation

[MG-FIDO]

Bodo said:

I'm native German; and I've only started learning English properly after school on PH.

The basics, as taught in school, are a good start; however you really start to enjoy a language when you can practice it. From the convenience of your home, you could listen to German radio, watch movies in German with English subtitles, read German news www.faz.net or www.spiegel.de or for very basic language www.bild.de
Use forums about topics that interest you www.motor-talk.de and start contributing. For reading and translation, you can use http://dict.leo.org - an online dictionary with more than 780,000 words. Install their 'bookmarklet' and then just select the word in question on a website and hit the bookmark in your browser's linkbar.

The biggest benefit a second language gives has to be that you are more conscious about your mother tongue as well; in that you put more effort into expressing yourself along the way. You'll also be able to notice the smaller differences in cultures. And yes: you'll understand German humour

I think something must've been lost in translation there... German "humour"?